In 2003, with the support of Arkansas Medicaid, the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) launched the Antenatal and Neonatal Guidelines, Education and Learning System (ANGELS), a telemedicine program that seeks to improve the quality of and access to high-risk pregnancy care in rural Arkansas. ANGELS operates a 24-hour nurse-staffed call center and disseminates evidence-based practice guidelines, as well as provides maternal fetal medicine (MFM) consultation services via telemedicine for rural providers and their patients. To identify areas of success that this telemedicine program has made and examine where improvements need to be achieved, the evaluation team continuously analyzes Medicaid claims data, birth certificates and hospital discharge records in Arkansas from 2001 up to the most recent year. Since last year, we have also collected the data of MFM telemedicine consultations to determine if the telemedicine reached a low socio-demographic population and whether the highest risk conditions were appropriately targeted.

In this presentation, we will first provide the background of the ANGELS program, including a description of the need for program evaluation and research. We will then demonstrate what data are in the ANGELS database and the methodology we use to link the data from multiple sources, providing more comprehensive insights than would be possible with a single data source. By analyzing this multi-source data, we will show a set of standard metrics used to monitor the trends in maternal and neonatal care in Arkansas after the implementation of the ANGELS program.